Helene Britton: Baseball’s First Female Owner

At the beginning of the 1910s, baseball had never been more popular up to that point. It had been known as the National Pastime with millions of fans swarming into ballparks to see their heroes play.

But despite the sport’s popularity, the St. Louis Cardinals were bottom feeders for the first 20 years of the 20th Century. They were finishing 30-plus games below .500 and occasionally placing last in the National League.

That’s not to say that they weren’t making history.

In 1911, during a women’s suffrage movement in the United States, the Cardinals made history. They became the first team in professional sports history to have a female owner.

Her name was Helene Britton.

She was born on January 30, 1879, and spent her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father and uncle owned a streetcar business as well as the Cleveland Spiders (now called the Guardians), and she developed an interest in baseball at a young age.

Britton described baseball as ‘a better mental exercise than anything’ and her uncle, named Stanley Robison moved on from Cleveland and became the owner of the Cardinals in 1900.

Finally, Stanley Robison passed away in March 1911, and in his will, he revealed that he wanted the ownership of the club to be given to his niece, Helene.

She became known as baseball’s First Lady.

In a male-dominated world back then, Britton was determined to make a strong name for women, and also stay heavily involved in baseball operations with her team. When reports dismissed the notion that a female would operate a professional baseball team, Helene went out and led an example.

She became the owner of the Cardinals nine years before women won the right to vote. She would occasionally receive spiteful remarks even from her female comrades and some fans called her the team mascot who’s also running the operations.

But Helene wanted to spread her love and influence of baseball onto the female population. In an effort to lure more women to Cardinals games, Britton held a Ladies’ Day at the ballpark (Robison Field) encouraging her own gender to develop an interest in the National Pastime.

At a convention during the 1915 offseason, the other club owners demanded that Britton sell her club ‘for the good of the game’ and couldn’t bear to see a female running the same operations as them.

Despite numerous difficulties that Helene Britton faced at the helm of the Cardinals, she held steady and handled her responsibility with pride. Eventually though, the Cardinals continued to suffer at the bottom of the National League and during Britton’s tenure, they finished last place in 1913, endured more pirating from new clubs of the recently developed Federal League in 1914, and finished over 30 games below .500 in 1916.

The Cardinals were one of the poorest teams in baseball, and their spot in the standings didn’t get much better. A few years later, Britton felt it best for her to sell the team, but by no means from the urging of the other owners. Her finances were in peril.

Britton sold the Cardinals to a local investment group led by Sam Beardon, who would then become the next owner of the Cardinals for $350,000 in 1918.

Although she was now out of baseball as a club owner, Britton’s love and joy of the game never wavered throughout her life. Regarding her success in the big leagues, Britton remarked, “All I ever needed was an opportunity. That’s all any woman needs.”

Helene Britton died in 1950 at the age of 70.

A fact that appears to be overlooked in not just baseball but in St. Louis is that the Cardinals were the first team in Major League Baseball to have a female owner.

The St. Louis Cardinals were the first team to do many things that created seismic changes in the game.